The Bishop of Cottontown: A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills

She came over by the fire. Her face was flushed; her beautiful sad eyes lighted with excitement. "Do you remember the first time I ever heard you sing, Alice?" His voice was earnest and full of pathos, for him. "Was it not when father dressed me as a gypsy girl and I rode my pony over to The Gaffs and sang from horse-back for your grandfather?" He nodded: "I thought you were the prettiest thing I ever saw, and I have thought so ever since. That's when I fell in love with you." "I remember quite distinctly what you did," she said. "You were a big boy and you came up behind my pony and jumped on, frightening us dreadfully." "Tried to kiss you, didn't I?" She laughed: "That was ever a chronic endeavor of your youth." How pretty she looked. Had it been any other woman he would have reached over and taken her hand. "Overpower her, master her, make her love you by force of arms"--his inner voice said. He turned to the musing woman beside him and mechanically reached out his hand. Hers lay on the arm of her chair. The next instant he would have dropped his upon it and held it there. But as he made the motion her eyes looked up into his, so passion-free and holy that his own arm fell by his side. But the little wave of passion in him only stirred him to his depths. Ere she knew it or could stop him he was telling her the story of his love for her. Poetry,--romance,--and with it the strength of saying,--fell from his lips as naturally as snow from the clouds. He went into the history of old loves--how, of all loves they are the greatest--of Jacob who served his fourteen years for Rachel, of the love of Petrarch, of Dante. "Do you know Browning's most beautiful poem?" he asked at last. His voice was tenderly mellow: "All that I know of a certain star Is, it can throw (like the angled spar) Now a dart of red, now a dart of blue; Till my friends have said they would fain see, too, My star that dartles the red and the blue! Then it stops like a bird; like a flower, hangs furled: They must solace themselves with the Saturn above it. What matter to me if their star is a world? Mine has opened its soul to me; therefore I love it." "Alice," he said, drawing his chair closer to her, "I know I have no such life to offer as you would bring to me. The best we men can do is to do the best we can. We are saved only because there is one woman we can look to always as our star. There is much of our past that we all might wish to change, but change, like work, is the law of life, and we must not always dream." Quietly he had dropped his hand upon hers. Her own eyes were far off--they were dreaming. So deep was her dream that she had not noticed it. Passion practised, as he was, the torch of her hand thrilled him as with wine; and as with wine was he daring. "I know where your thoughts have been," he went on. She looked up with a start and her hand slipped from under his into her lap. It was a simple movement and involuntary--like that of the little brown quail when she slips from the sedge-grass into the tangled depths of the blossoming wild blackberry bushes at the far off flash of a sharp-shinned hawk-wing, up in the blue. Nor could she say whether she saw it, or whether it was merely a shadow, an instinctive signal from the innocent courts of the sky to the brood-children of her innocence below. But he saw it and said quickly, changing with it the subject: "At least were--but all that has passed. I need you, Alice," he went on passionately--"in my life, in my work. My home is there, waiting! It has been waiting all these years for you--its mistress--the only mistress it shall ever have. Your mother"--Alice looked at him surprised. "Your mother--you,--perhaps, had not thought of that--your mother needs the rest and the care we could give her. Our lives are not always our own," he went on gravely--"oftentimes it belongs partly to others--for their happiness." He felt that he was striking a winning chord. "You can love me if you would say so," he said, bending low over her. This time, when his hand fell on hers, she did not move. Surprised, he looked into her eyes. There were tears there. Travis knew when he had gone far enough. Reverently he kissed her hand as he said: "Never mind--in your own time, Alice. I can wait--I have waited long. Twenty years," he added, patiently, even sweetly, "and if need be, I'll wait twenty more." "I'll go now," he said, after a moment. She looked at him gratefully, and arose. "One moment, Richard," she said--"but you were speaking of mother, and knowing your zeal for her I was afraid you might--might--the mortgage has been troubling her." "Oh, no--no"--he broke in quickly--"I did nothing--absolutely nothing--though I wanted to for your sake." "I'm so glad," she said--"we will manage somehow. I am so sensitive about such things." "I'll come to-morrow afternoon and bring your mare." She smiled, surprised. "Yes, your mare--I happened on her quite unexpectedly in Tennessee. I have bought her for you--she is elegant, and I wish you to ride her often. I have given Jim orders that no one but you shall ride her. If it is a pretty day to-morrow I shall be around in the afternoon, and we will ride down to the bluffs five miles away to see the sunset." The trotters were at the door. He took her hand as he said good-bye, and held it while he added: "Maybe you'd better forget all I said to-night--be patient with me--remember how long I have waited." He was off and sprang into the buggy, elated. Never before had she let him hold her hand even for a moment. He felt, he knew, that he would win her. He turned the horses and drove off. From Westmoreland Travis drove straight toward the town. The trotters, keen and full of play, flew along, tossing their queenly heads in the very exuberance of life. At The Gaffs, he drew rein: "Now, Jim, I'll be back at midnight. You sleep light until I come in, and have their bedding dry and blankets ready." He tossed the boy a dollar as he drove off. Up the road toward the town he drove, finally slackening his trotters' speed as he came into the more thickly settled part of the outskirts. Sand Mountain loomed high in the faint moonlight, and at its base, in the outposts of the town, arose the smoke-stack of the cotton mills. Around it lay Cottontown. Slowly he brought the nettled trotters down to a walk. Quietly he turned them into a shaded lane, overhung with forest trees, near which a cottage, one of the many belonging to the mill, stood in the shadow of the forest. Stopping his horses in the shadow, he drew out his watch and pressed the stem. It struck eleven. He drew up the buggy-top and taking the little silver whistle from his pocket, gave a low whistle. It was ten minutes later before the side door of the cottage opened softly and a girl came noiselessly out. She slipped out, following the shadow line of the trees until she came up to the buggy. Then she threw the shawl from off her face and head and stood smiling up at Travis. It had been a pretty face, but now it was pinched by overwork and there was the mingling both of sadness and gladness in her eyes. But at sight of Travis she blushed joyfully, and deeper still when he held out his hand and drew her into the buggy and up to the seat beside him. "Maggie"--was all he whispered. Then he kissed her passionately on her lips. "I am glad I came," he went on, as he put one arm around her and drew her to him--"you're flushed and the ride will do you good." She was satisfied to let her head lie on his shoulder. "They are beauties"--she said after a while, as the trotters' thrilling, quick step brought the blood tingling to her veins. "Beauties for the beauty," said Travis, kissing her again. Her brown hair was in his face and the perfume of it went through him like the whistling flash of the first wild doe he had killed in his first boyish hunt and which he never forgot. "You do love me," she said at last, looking up into his face, where her head rested. She could not move because his arm held her girlish form to him with an overpowering clasp. "Why?" he asked, kissing her again and in sheer passionate excess holding his lips on hers until she could not speak, but only look love with her eyes. When she could, she sighed and said: "Because, you could not make me so happy if you didn't." He relaxed his arm to control the trotters, which were going too fast down the road. She sat up by his side and went on. "Do you know I have thought lots about what you said last Saturday night?" "Why, what?" he asked. She looked pained that he had forgotten. "About--about--our bein' married to each other--even--even--if--if--there's no preacher. You know--that true love makes marriages, and not a ceremony--and--and--that the heart is the priest to all of us, you know!" Travis said nothing. He had forgotten all about it. "One thing I wrote down in my little book when I got back home an' memorized it--Oh, you can say such beautiful things." He seized her and kissed her again. "I am so happy with you--always--" she laughed. He drove toward the shaded trees down by the river. "I want you to see how the setting moonlight looks on the river," he said. "There is nothing in all nature like it. It floats like a crescent above, falling into the arms of its companion below. All nature is love and never fails to paint a love scene in preference to all others, if permitted. How else can you account for it making two lover moons fall into each other's arms," he laughed. She looked at him enraptured. It was the tribute which mediocrity pays to genius. Presently they passed by Westmoreland, and from Alice's window a light shone far out into the golden tinged leaves of the beeches near. Travis glanced up at it. Then at the pretty mill-girl by his side: "A star and--a satellite!"--he smiled to himself. CHAPTER XI A MIDNIGHT BURIAL It was growing late when the old preacher left Westmoreland and rode leisurely back toward the cabin on Sand Mountain. The horse he was riding--a dilapidated roan--was old and blind, but fox-trotted along with the easy assurance of having often travelled the same road. The bridle rested on the pommel of the saddle. The old man's head was bent in deep thought, and the roan, his head also down and half dreaming, jogged into the dark shadows which formed a wooded gulch, leading into the valley and from thence into the river. There is in us an unnameable spiritual quality which, from lack of a more specific name, we call mental telepathy. Some day we shall know more about it, just as some day we shall know what unknown force it is which draws the needle to the pole. It is the border land of the spiritual--a touch of it, given, to let us know there is more and in great abundance in the country to which we ultimately shall go,--a glimpse of the kingdom which is to be. To-night, this influence was on the old man. The theme of his thoughts was, Captain Tom. Somehow he felt that even then Captain Tom was near him. How--where--why--he could not tell. He merely felt it. And so the very shadows of the trees grew uncanny to him as he rode by them and the slight wind among them mourned _Captain Tom--Captain Tom_. It was a desolate place in the narrow mountain road and scarcely could the old man see the white sand which wound in and through it, and then out again on the opposite side into the clearing beyond the scraggy side of Sand Mountain. But the horse knew every foot of the way, and though it was always night with him, instinct had taught him a sure footing.